Fascinated, Cronise began a regimen of cold showers and shirtless walks in winter, and he lost 26.7 pounds in six weeks. He began measuring his metabolism during and after cold exposure, and found that his body was burning a tremendous amount of energy. Rather than storing energy as fat, his body was using it to sustain his core temperature. Cronise’s preliminary experiments led him to put together what is now a pretty high-tech lab in his Huntsville, Alabama, home, where he conducts miniature scientific studies, mostly on himself. All of this attracted publicity, naturally. Timothy Ferriss hyped Cronise’s unorthodox weight-loss success in the 2010 best seller The 4-Hour Body. That same year, Cronise gave a popular TEDMED Talk. Wired ran a feature story describing his home laboratory, titled “The Shiver System.” Through it all, Cronise endured not just the obvious physical discomfort of his endeavors, but the discomfort of personal and public criticism. Some detractors raised concerns about regularly exposing one’s skin to cold (Cronise shared these worries); others accused him of diverting people away from solid principles of weight management and toward dubious shortcuts.
Cronise believes that his weight-loss story was misunderstood and may have distracted people from the important issue of nutrition. “You can’t freeze yourself thin,” he told me. “When I first started, I had kind of a naive approach that I was going to suck calories out of people.” But his interest in altering metabolism through exposure to mild cold—which he defines as 55 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit—has only grown. Such temperatures are far enough below the socially accepted range that people plunked into a 50-something degree office would complain to no end. Unless, maybe, they believed it was good for them.
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